Millennium’s Morning: A New Act, Old Inequalities

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2001 | Period covered: July–December 2000

Key Developments at a Glance

• Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 receives Royal Assent in November; duty to promote race equality extended to public bodies.
• Macpherson Report’s two-year anniversary: community organisations audit Metropolitan Police reform progress and find it wanting.
• Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust established; family continues to press for the changes the Macpherson Report demanded.
• Caribbean community welcomes the new Race Act but warns that implementation must be matched by genuine accountability.
• PJ Patterson’s government in Jamaica manages economic adjustment; diaspora remittances remain critical to household incomes.
• General election expected in 2001; Caribbean community prepares for Labour’s anticipated second term.

The second half of 2000 is, in many respects, a period of consolidation and assessment for the Caribbean community in Britain. The euphoria of the 1997 Labour landslide has settled into the more sober business of holding the government to account for its commitments on race equality, immigration, and the quality of public services. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which receives Royal Assent in November, is a genuine legislative achievement — the product of years of advocacy by Caribbean community organisations, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the families of those killed in racially motivated crimes who refused to let their losses be absorbed without consequence. The community receives it with genuine satisfaction and immediate insistence on vigilance: legislation changes what governments can be held to; it does not by itself change what governments do.

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000

The Race Relations Act 1976 was a landmark piece of legislation that made racial discrimination in employment, education, housing, and the provision of goods and services unlawful. But it contained a significant exemption: public authorities, including the police, were not fully covered by its provisions. The experience of the following quarter century — and most painfully the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence — demonstrated the consequences of that exemption: a police service that treated Black people differently, that failed to investigate racially motivated crimes with the seriousness those crimes demanded, and that was found by the Macpherson Inquiry to be institutionally racist, had been operating for decades in a legal environment that did not hold it to the standard it owed Black citizens.

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 closes that exemption. All public authorities are now prohibited from discriminating on grounds of race in the exercise of their functions, and they are placed under a positive duty to promote race equality — to take active steps to identify and address racial disparities in outcomes, to monitor their own performance, and to publish reports on their progress. For the Caribbean community, the positive duty is the crucial element: it shifts the frame from passive non-discrimination to active equality promotion, requiring institutions to demonstrate that they are closing racial gaps rather than merely avoiding the most egregious forms of overt bias.

Macpherson at Two Years: Progress and Limits

The Macpherson Report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in February 1999, contained seventy recommendations whose implementation has been the subject of sustained monitoring by community organisations, the Home Affairs Select Committee, and the Home Office itself. At two years’ distance, the picture is mixed. Some of the Report’s operational recommendations — on the recording of racist incidents, on the first response to racist crime, on the management of family liaison — have been implemented and are producing measurable change. But the deeper cultural change that Macpherson demanded — the acknowledgement and dismantling of institutional racism within the force — remains contested both within the police and in government.

Stop-and-search data for 2000 continues to show Black people being stopped at rates between four and six times higher than White people, a disparity that has not narrowed significantly since the Report was published. Recruitment of Black and minority ethnic officers has increased modestly, but retention remains a problem as BME officers report experiencing the same racism from within the institution that Macpherson documented. The community organisations that gave evidence to the inquiry are pressing for a statutory requirement for annual reporting on the implementation of all seventy recommendations, and for an independent body with real powers to monitor compliance.

Jamaica: Remittances, Debt and the Turn of the Century

In Jamaica, the People’s National Party government of PJ Patterson has navigated the turn of the millennium in economic conditions that remain challenging. The island’s debt burden — the product of decades of borrowing to manage fiscal gaps and currency pressures — continues to consume a share of public revenue that makes sustained investment in health, education, and infrastructure structurally difficult. Remittances from the diaspora in Britain, North America, and elsewhere remain the single most significant source of income for hundreds of thousands of Jamaican households, a flow of support that supplements and in some cases substitutes for the public services that debt-constrained government budgets cannot adequately fund.

The diaspora in Britain maintains its engagement with Jamaica through remittances, through visits, through the participation of returning residents who bring skills and resources acquired abroad, and through the advocacy of organisations that press both the British and Jamaican governments to invest in Jamaica’s human development with the seriousness it deserves. The relationship is a living one, maintained across generations and across the miles by the networks of family, community, and cultural connection that the Windrush generation and its successors built.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Runnymede Trust; Commission for Racial Equality; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard.

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